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Life begins, with net neutrality.

No net neutrality. Imagine a situation where you are stuck with only Flipkart for online shopping. Only Facebook for social networking. And nothing for blogging. So, whenever you open the browser, you see only Flipkart, Facebook, and some selected websites by the network operators to browse. Will you be happy? Inspite of paying for the internet pack you will get access only to those websites which the specific operator has a tie-up with.

Ok, so let’s assume you are super-rich. Maybe rich enough to buy the Lufthansa Airways (oops, that’s an exaggeration). Or maybe rich enough to afford a BMW 7 series. So you would, go for all those specific packs available when there is no net neutrality. Like Whatsapp Pack, Twitter pack, Youtube Pack, WordPress pack, Blogger.com Pack(oh, sorry it’s always free …) and other such packs. You’ll be like, eh who cares, I want to access the internet freely, and I will, because my salary is so & so LPA.

But what about students like us? We, at times are so broke that we even have to ask very small amount of money for recharging our phone from our friends. Say, a 10 rupees pack has 25MB of data usage. But what if there is no net neutrality? We will have to borrow more money. Suppose, our teacher has sent us some important question papers through Whatsapp and Gmail. Now, there is no net neutrality. So, we friends go to our teacher and say her to rather print them, because, we won’t have enough money to spend on the data pack, then Whatsapp pack and then Gmail pack.

This is net neutrality. If there is no net neutrality, I believe, the whole internet sphere will be biased. It is like, the TV channels thing. Suppose you buy a dish TV. After that, you have to pay a monthly minimum of say, 300 rupees for some channels. Now, there are various packs for various kinds of people. Like say suppose you are an international journalist, you would need those BBC, CNN, RT, etc. If you are a home-maker (mind you, not housewife, because you are the wife of your husband, not the house!) then you would need FoodFood, Khana Khazana and all those channels which would help in household chores, and probably Star CJ alive to buy household stuff.

Now for the extra channels you have to pay more amount. Otherwise you will be stuck with the same free channels. Same way, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India was planning to do the same thing and put a restriction on net neutrality. And hence they forced us consumers to write a petition stating that we want net neutrality.

Also, one more issue of worry was, the regulation and restriction of freedom. Every action and transaction of yours, on the internet could be monitored, by the telecom operators. Because there would be a handful of customers who would go for subscribing all the packs. And keeping a watch on them should be easier than now it is.

I do hope positively that the TRAI maintains the net neutrality and the internet should not get biased by any circumstances.